The Old Florida Still Lives – Part 1

We took advantage of the Presidents Day holiday and headed south to wonderful Tallahassee, Florida to stay with my old friends Larry and Teri for a week of fun and sun.

We left on a Friday the 18th, after work. Big mistake! Northern Virginia is beyond the pale when it comes to traffic. THE WORST!!! It took us 5 hours to get from Annapolis to Fredericksburg – and there were no accidents to explain the parking lot nature of the Alexandria/Dumfries region.

 

I don’t do sitting in traffic very well and I began whining relentlessly. I wanted to kill myself, or turn around and go back home. And to add insult to injury, they have nearly-empty HOV3 lanes that parallel the I-95 parking lot. It is failed social engineering at it’s most absurd. If you have three people in a car, the taxpayers provide you with an empty three lane highway. Maryland does HOV2 and that would have made all the difference in the world. But NO! Virginia is for lovers & fools and they make you sit and rot in the name of global warming.

So, the start to our little excursion was not very fun. But once we got beyond Richmond, it was clear sailing down busy I-95. We had hoped to make Lumberton, NC, or maybe even Florence, SC, that first night, but settled on a nice motel run by the friendly Patels (Why do Indians own most of America’s aging motels?) in that garden spot, Rocky Mount, NC.

We got up the next morning and were greeted by several very inviting program changes. It was warm, and sunny, and everything was in bloom. And THAT’s what I’m talking about! And the further South we went, the better and hotter it got.

Our timing was perfect for the trip. Florida had been cold and rainy for weeks and we hit it just when the weather broke. We had sun and temps in the high 70’s and low 80’s pretty much the whole time.

We pushed south, with a brief (and totally misguided) detour to see the hellhole called Florence, South Carolina. Downtown Florence is like looking at one of those joke postcards “Wish You Weren’t Here!”

We quickly bailed and got back on I-95.

 

We decided to break up the drive around 2, and stretch our legs in Savannah. There were two major festivals underway (book and Irish) and the place was totally rocking out. We took the Old Savannah Trolley tour, which proved to be a terrible blunder. The trolley could barely get around the log-jammed streets and you couldn’t really see much inside the hot, cramped confines of the tin can on wheels. We ended up bailing after the third stop and just walked the sultry streets on our own.

Savannah is very cool and people were walking around with beers in their hands like it was giant block party. Savannah is home to the Savannah School of Design (the largest design school in the country) in the heart of the old city and the students are creatively renovating many of the historic structures. The city founder, Governor Oglethorpe, was a visionary who laid out the city grid so that it was interspersed with small, tree-lined rectangular parks on almost every block surrounded by splendid houses, shops, and churches dating back to Colonial times.

And on every block, there’s a tall tale from long ago. We wanted to stay longer, but the sun was going down and it was time to get back on the road.

 

We finally got off of I-95 and took I-10 in Jacksonville, and arrived in Tallahassee at 10 o’clock on Saturday night. At that point we were in a state of suspended animation after the 15 hour marathon drive. We felt like we were still bouncing along in the car even when we were sitting on Larry and TC’s lovely back porch. After many Newcastle beers and glasses of red wine, we finally fell into dreamland.

On Sunday we arose to Spring in all of its glory. The trees were in bloom and the whole place smelled like honey. Larry and TC have a really nice house in a Stepford Wives community just north of Tallahassee. Larry recently retired from the Forest Service, while Teri is the Deputy Supervisor for all of the National Forests in Florida. She is temporarily running the three forests in Alabama and works during the week in Montgomery, Alabama, staying in a hotel and then coming back home on the weekends.

 

We spent our first day kayaking down the Wakulla River, starting in the Wakulla Springs. Most of the rivers in the panhandle of Florida are fed by spectacular Category 1 underground springs, meaning the water is unbelievably clear. And Wakulla Springs is the largest and deepest fresh water spring in the world.

 

The “Tarzan” movies were filmed there, along with “Creature From the Black Lagoon”.

Inna and I rented kayaks from a place called Wilderness World and Larry and TC guided us through 7 miles of pure heaven, filled with gators, manatees, water moccasins, turtles, otters, egrets, herons, bald eagles, vultures, osprey, ibis, limpkin, anhinga, wood ducks, and pelicans (my favorite). We finished up our little paddle near the Gulf of Mexico, where the Wakulla meets the St. Marks River, in a funky oasis filled with biker oyster bars.

 

Here’s the thing: If you are looking for the old Florida, you need look no further than the area around Tallahassee. It’s dirt roads, shitkickers and trailers, cinder block liquor stores, dollar stores, seafood stands in the backs of pickup trucks, simple churches in the woods, and goofy roadside attractions galore. It’s my kind of place. And while the people may be a bit rough around the edges, they are amazingly friendly. Everywhere we went, the folks couldn’t have been nicer.

We loaded up the boats and stopped at this amazing dive called the Riverside Café, literally hanging out over the St. Marks River. A local band of hoodlums were playing swamp rock from an outdoor stage and drunken redneck men & women lurched in the sand like fish out of water. It was endlessly amusing.

Birds flew through the restaurant and everyone was having a goddamn ball, pounding cheap beer and eating fresh seafood.